Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016

Floor Speech

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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I wish to speak about two separate topics. The first is Venezuela.

Venezuela is a country in our hemisphere in total crisis, total chaos, and that is because of a number of things: failed leadership, failed economic policies, a complete societal breakdown, human rights abuses, and now a de facto political coupe that has plagued the country for about 15 years. This all started with Hugo Chavez and has now continued with Nicolas Maduro, his successor.

Let's talk about the first cause of the disaster that has now befallen the people of Venezuela--failed leadership. For over 15 years now, Venezuela has been ruled by two strongmen who have mismanaged the country with an iron fist, have squandered its vast wealth and natural resources, they have imprisoned political opponents, they have corrupted all of the country's political institutions to ignore the will of the people and to entrench their power.

By the way, this failed leadership has only gotten worse because the successor to Hugo Chavez is a completely incompetent person. On top of the fact he is a strongman, he is incompetent. He does not know what he is doing. The result is this very wealthy country, with a highly educated population, is being led by someone who, quite frankly, isn't qualified to lead anything, much less a nation of the stature of Venezuela.

The second cause is failed economic policies. Venezuela suffers from shortages across the board. For example, there are shortages of medicine and medical equipment, which means--and this is not an exaggeration--people are literally dying because their doctors cannot prescribe drugs that aren't available, and the hospitals and the clinics don't have the equipment needed to conduct surgeries. When you speak to medical professionals in Venezuela, they will tell you there are simple medications that could save the life of an individual, but they can't do anything about it. I had someone tell me today they asked a doctor: What do you do when one of your patients is about to die? And he said: Nothing. We comfort them as they die. We don't have basic medicines to deliver to them.

Unlike the case of Cuba, by the way, where they are saying it is because of the embargo by the United States--which of course is ridiculous and is another topic for another day--there is no embargo on Venezuela. There are no sanctions on Venezuela and its people. So as a result, there is no explanation for this.

The supermarkets are bare. The shelves are completely bare. People there cannot buy food or even basics such as toilet paper, toothpaste, toothbrushes--anything.

In addition to the government's political censorship effort, its economic policies also help censor in the sense that there are shortages of paper that independent newspapers need to print their editions. So here is another Machiavellian move the government has made. There is a shortage of paper, and so they make sure the independent press has no access to paper. If you don't have paper, you can't print a newspaper.

Things are so bad in Venezuela, economists earlier this month compared Venezuela to Mugabe's Zimbabwe of 15 years ago. The reason that is an unbelievable comparison is because, as I said earlier, Venezuela has one of the largest, if not the largest, oil reserves in the world; they have a highly educated population; they have a well-established business class of professionals; and last year their economy shrank by 5.7 percent, and this year it will shrink by another 8 percent. This is a country that now has rolling blackouts--an energy-rich country that has rolling blackouts. It has gotten so bad that today their so-called President, the incompetent Nicolas Maduro, announced that government employees are only going to work 2 days a week, Mondays and Tuesdays. Government offices will be open only 2 days a week because they aren't turning on the lights. This is the state of one of the richest countries in the world and one of the richest countries in our hemisphere.

They have had a total societal breakdown. Economic misery begets desperation, and we are seeing that reflected in the lawlessness that plagues Venezuela. Crime rates are among the highest in the hemisphere, particularly the murder rate. It stems from the top, at the highest levels of leadership. When an incompetent thug is running a country-- someone whose government intimidates opponents by using what they call colectivos, which are nothing more than street gangs, to ride around on motorcycles, causing all kinds of mayhem, shooting and attacking people--it only contributes to the lawlessness. Caracas, Venezuela, which is a beautiful city, is one of the most dangerous places in the world, comparable with war zones in terms of the murder rate. It is basically every man and woman for himself and herself in Venezuela.

They have atrocious human rights abuses. Since the government's crackdown on demonstrators and political opponents began in February of 2014, dozens of innocents have been killed, thousands have been beaten and targeted for intimidation, and hundreds have been jailed, including Leopoldo Lopez, who has been a political prisoner now for more than 2 years.

We need to demand the release of all 115 political prisoners in Venezuela and respect their rights and those of their families. I heard another horrifying story today. Most political prisoners are men. When their wives go visit them in prison, their wives are strip searched by male guards as an ultimate act of humiliating them. This is the situation in Venezuela.

Last, but not least, we have a de facto political coup by the Maduro regime. This country faces a real political and constitutional crisis. Maduro has stacked the country's supreme court with his loyalists, and the supreme court is basically nullifying every law the Congress there passes.

The opposition won the election in the last cycle. By the way, they won because the discontent with the government is so massive that they couldn't steal the election. It was so big that not even they could steal the election from them, so they sat this new Congress. He has stacked the supreme court, and the supreme court is literally nullifying law after law--doing it not for judicial reasons but for blatantly political ones.

Maduro basically ignores the law. The congressional branch there will pass a law with a veto-proof majority, and he just ignores it. Imagine passing a law out of the House, out of the Senate, and sending it to the President. He can't veto it, and so he just ignores it or refuses to do it.

That is the situation in our own hemisphere. The result is an incredible disaster--of deep interest to us, by the way, because of all the uncertainty it is causing in the region. So what can we do about it? First of all, it is in our national interest. The current situation is happening in our own hemisphere. It threatens to destabilize the region. It creates more pressure on our neighbors and our strategic allies, such as Colombia, where Venezuelans have been fleeing to. This creates migratory pressures on the United States. The lawlessness is fueling organized crime, including drug cartels, which senior government officials in Venezuela have established links to, which impacts our entire region.

For these reasons and more, the United States has an interest in making sure Venezuela does not spiral further out of control.

The first thing we should do is we should be active at the Organization of American States as it considers the situation in Venezuela, and they should ask that voting members recognize the humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela.

The United States should ask our allies in the region, countries that receive an extensive amount of aid from this country--Haiti, Colombia, the Central American nations, our neighbors up north in Canada, among others--to support this effort. Right now we are about to give hundreds of millions of dollars to countries in Central America, in the Northern Triangle, the Alliance for Prosperity. I think that is a good idea, but we should ask them to support what I hope we will try to do at the OAS. The same with Haiti. We have poured millions of dollars into Haiti's reconstruction. We should use that as leverage to ask them to support something happening at the OAS.

What has happened in Venezuela is nothing short of a coup d'etat, a de facto coup, and the Organization of American States--if it has any reason to exist anymore, it should be to defend democracy in the region. It is the reason we have an Organization of American States. We will soon find out whether that organization is even worth continuing to exist if it cannot pronounce itself collectively on the outright violation of democracy in a nation that purports to be a democratic republic.

Sanctions. We have to impose sanctions on human rights violators--not sanctions on the people of Venezuela, not sanctions on the government, on human rights violators, many of whom steal money from the Venezuelan people and invest it in the United States.

On the front page of the Miami Herald yesterday was a story that one of the individuals linked to the petroleum industry with the Government in Venezuela, a billionaire--and you become a millionaire with these links by basically stealing the money--is the secret developer behind a major development in Miami, FL, in my hometown, in my home State. Travel to Florida, come down there, and let me know--any of my colleagues--and I will show you where these people live, and I will show you the money they have stolen from the Venezuelan people, and they are living the high life on weekends in Miami. You will see them everywhere. That is why we imposed sanctions on them. There will be an effort here, I hope, in the next day or so to extend those sanctions for another 3 years.

Finally, I hope the United States uses our megaphone to highlight the corruption in the institutions of the Government of Venezuela. That should not be tolerated.

There is also a humanitarian component to this. We should help make sure the Venezuelan Government is not stealing or otherwise standing in the way of the Venezuelan people getting the medicines and food they need.

For far too long, the issues in this hemisphere have been ignored by administrations in both parties, by this administration. We can no longer ignore this. I hope we give Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere the attention and the priority they merit. It is in our national interests to do so. Puerto Rico

Mr. President, I want to briefly discuss the issue of Puerto Rico and the debt crisis Puerto Rico is facing. The island faces a major deadline coming up. A $422 million debt payment is due on May 1, which is this Sunday. If this deadline isn't met, it is going to cause some serious problems, and not just for the people of Puerto Rico--who, let's not forget, are American citizens--but also for millions of others throughout the United States. Today I will focus on one example of an American community that would be very negatively impacted, and that is the city of Jacksonville in my home State of Florida.

Jacksonville is a port city, so its residents, businesses, and families depend in large part on trade. A recent article in the Florida Times-Union detailed exactly how close the relationship is between Puerto Rico and the shipping industry in Jacksonville.

In 2009, as much as 75 percent of the goods coming in and out of Puerto Rico flowed through the ports in Jacksonville, which brought about $1 billion worth of economic impact to the city. In just the past year, between October and March, JAXPORT has seen a 32- percent increase in cargo tonnage from the island. But this trend is likely to reverse if fiscal conditions in San Juan do not improve soon.

If Puerto Rico misses its payment on May 1 and its debt crisis further escalates, its economy is going to stagnate even more than it already has, and the harm is going to be passed on to any community like Jacksonville that has a significant economic stake in the island's well-being. We have already seen a massive exodus of professionals and others from Puerto Rico because of a lack of economic growth. They will likely continue leaving and heading to Florida and other places on the mainland, which will further cripple the island's economy and reduce the demand for trade.

So what can we do about all this? Some have suggested that Washington can deliver a silver bullet solution to help Puerto Rico out of its debt. This simply isn't true. The reality is that nothing Washington does will be effective until Puerto Rico and its government leaders turn away from decades of failed policies. Their tax rate continues to be too high, government regulations are stifling, and they are spending more than they take in. I don't care if you are an island, government, business, or family--if you spend more than you take in and you do it for long enough, you are going to have a debt problem. That is what is happening here in Washington, and that is what is happening in Puerto Rico. Anytime your economy isn't growing, you are going to have a further problem, and no restructuring is going to solve that until they restructure the way they spend money. Bankruptcy protection isn't going to solve it, either, at least not without serious fiscal reforms from San Juan. Otherwise, if we grant bankruptcy protection, Puerto Rico will simply go bankrupt again not far down the road.

That does not mean Washington should do nothing. All of us need to realize that this is an American crisis. It is taking place in an American territory. It impacts the people of Puerto Rico, who are American citizens. The impact will not be contained on the island; it will spread to cities like Jacksonville and other communities throughout the mainland United States.

So we need to take the irresponsible leadership in Puerto Rico seriously. We need to urge them to get their affairs in order. But we should also look closely at what we can do here in the Senate, which may mean taking up some of the ideas currently being worked on by House leadership. We can also help Puerto Rico by doing the same things necessary to help the rest of the American economy. This means passing pro-growth policies at the Federal level, including tax and regulatory reform. It means we need to stop spending more money than we take in.

In closing, the leadership in San Juan must view the deadline this Sunday as a wake-up call. They must show their willingness to get their fiscal house in order. If they don't, our options in Washington will be very limited and won't have support from taxpayers.

But I think this is a wake-up call for us. The notion that somehow this issue with Puerto Rico will figure itself out is not true. The notion that somehow this issue with Puerto Rico is not that important, that we can put it to the side because it is not a State, is not true. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. Its people are U.S. citizens. Its people, by the way, on a per capita basis serve in the Armed Forces of the United States at levels as high or higher than any ethnic or geographic group in the country.

The people of Puerto Rico deserve our voice, and they deserve our action. I commend leaders in the House for trying to do something responsible on this. I understand the majority leader has said that once the House acts, the Senate will look at it very carefully. I know we have leaders here doing that as well. I urge that work to continue. We cannot ignore this crisis, and neither can the leaders in San Juan. I hope we can find a solution sooner than later for what Puerto Rico is facing with its fiscal crisis, which this Sunday we are going to be reading about when they miss their debt payment.

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